 Hey, guess what? By the time this video comes out, our plushie campaign will be live. Go check that out. We need 200 orders to actually be a success. Go get plushie. So today we're here for class of 86. This is yet another self-published YouTuber book. There are so many of these. I swear I could read one a week and not run out until the heat death of the universe. But yeah, there are a lot of these and this is another one. This one was written by Brad Jones, who here on YouTube is known as the Cinema Snob. And if you're not familiar with his work, he talks about movies. Specifically, he talks about a lot of like really weird, obscure ones and just makes fun of them. That's right. That's why I made sure to take a shit right on the McDonald's floor to let them know exactly what I thought of their salad shakers. And I've watched his stuff for a while. I found out he was publishing a book like a couple of days before this thing came out. And I was kind of curious because you know me, I do enjoy YouTuber books. And it's an ironic enjoyment usually, but you know, I do enjoy them. So I figured, eh, let's check this out. Is this one any good? Parts of it are. We'll get into that a bit more later. It's okay, I suppose, but we'll get into the details as this video goes on. Basically, Class of 86 is a book that, as Brad Jones himself put it, is inspired by the types of movies he grew up watching in the 80s. Like, it starts off as like a high school comedy, you know, an 80s style high school comedy. But then it has a big shift into a post-nuclear apocalyptic wasteland adventure. And then in the last chunk of the book, it becomes a slasher film. And I know that sounds like it would be really awkward to move between those very disparate genres. And yeah, it is kind of awkward, but I think that's deliberate, or at least partially deliberate. See, this book is overall a comedy. In fact, if I had to just put it into a genre, I would call it a dark comedy or black comedy. But this one, a lot of the comedy just comes from like very strange things happening. So I think the rapid shift between three very different genres, I think that's at least partially meant to be awkward and strange, and the awkward strangeness is supposed to make it a little bit funnier. And I think it succeeds. Now, with this book, I am not going to talk about like the story or characters a whole lot, because they frankly don't matter. Like this is very much a screwball comedy. And what I mean by that is a screwball comedy is basically a comedy where you don't have to have any real connection to anything that's going on. Like there's no underlying dramatic current of any sorts. There's nothing that's meant to be taken seriously or even can be taken seriously on any level. It is just a series of weird jokes. Usually screwball comedies are like very strange as well. Like they have bizarre senses of humor. Like, I don't know, I guess scary movie and a lot of the parodies that it inspired are kind of like that, where it's just like, whoa, so random stuff happening one after another. The characters in a screwball comedy typically don't have like real personalities or relationships. They are just joke dispensing machines, you know? Like they, a screwball comedy isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you're not really connected to it. Like some good examples of screwball comedies might be like Airplane, because that's a very funny movie. I love that movie, but you're not actually attached to any of the characters or anything that's going on. You're just there for a series of increasingly strange gags. A lot of episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia would fit this formula as well, or fit into this genre, fit this formula, I don't know. But a lot of them would fit it as well. Like in normal comedy, most of them are just like regular stories with a bunch of jokes thrown in when you think about it. Like if you were to take a movie like say Superbad or Rush Hour and you just cut out all the comedy, like you left the story and characters exactly as is, but you just cut out most of the jokes, those would still function as movies. Like they wouldn't be very good, I don't think, but they would still function. Like there would still be a story with villains and conflict and stuff. And again, it wouldn't work very well because both of those movies are mostly good because they're funny, but that's the difference. Like there is still some dramatic connection to things going on. That was a longer tangent than I intended, but I bring all that up because Class of 86, like I said, is a screwball comedy. There's not, like there is a story here, but it's so over the top and strange and disconnected, I guess, that you can't really get attached to it. And same with the characters. They have something resembling personalities, but they are not meant to be like real three-dimensional people. At least I don't think they're meant to be. If they were meant to be, then that's not good. But they are really just joke dispensing machines like I was saying. And so because this is a screwball comedy, it relies 100% on the humor. Like, do the jokes work? Do the jokes land? Am I consistently laughing throughout? And in this case, some of the jokes work, you know, some of them did land for me. Like, I laughed a fair few times while reading Class of 86, so I'll give it that. And I think most of the jokes I laughed at were meant to be funny, so it's not like it's so bad that I'm laughing at it. Like, I got a couple good laughs out of this, but only some of the time. Like, there are still quite a few jokes in here that are really awkward and kind of make me cringe. And even if they're not like that, they just don't quite stick the landing. You know, like, there's a lot of jokes in here where there's a good setup for something, but then once it gets to the punchline, it just doesn't quite work. And a lot of the jokes that I did laugh at, I don't really know how to explain this. Like, they're not something where there's like a real setup and punchline to it. It's just very strange stuff happening that is kind of funny. Like, there's a lot of bizarre situations in here, because like I said, the characters do not act like people. And the events of the story don't really lead into each other in any substantial way. Like I said, there's three different genres because there's basically three separate stories here. It's just like the same characters and they do go in something resembling chronological order. But some of the bizarre situations that did make me laugh, and I think it was intentional, are like near the beginning, there's a bunch of characters that are all driving to school together and some people in the backseat just start having sex. And the other characters act like this is totally normal, like this sort of thing happens all the time. It's just like, yep, those are our friends who are like really horny and way too handsy on each other and publicly. That's just what they're likely. It's just a strange moment that makes me laugh, you know? Like I said, there's not really a punchline there, it's just a weird funny thing happening. Or another situation where a character accidentally gets set on fire and starts running around in his house. Like, again, there's not really a set up or punchline there, it's just a strange thing that happened and I was laughing at it, especially because the person that happens to is an asshole. And now is a good time to mention that humor, when it's in text form, works differently than humor when it's on YouTube or in a visual medium, period. Because with a visual medium, you have to worry about stuff like, well, timing I guess is kind of important in text as well, but it works a lot differently. In visual, you have to worry about timing and you can take a joke that isn't very funny and if you have a good person delivering it, then their delivery can still make a bad joke funny. Like, you can't really do that in text form though, like it just doesn't work. That's why when you're talking about making jokes or making any sort of comedy in text form, it is usually better to follow the standard set up punchline payoff, or excuse me, set up and then punchline formula, or at the very least just have, you know, more very bizarre situations which can just be laughed at. Actually, I do want to take a second and mention that the final section of the book where it becomes a slasher movie and like people are killing off the characters and we aren't sure exactly what's going on at first and we're wondering like, how are they going to survive? How are they going to get out of this? That's like, number one, that is the only part of the book where there's like some actual dramatic stakes and dramatic tension. It's not just random goofiness happening all the time. But number two, it is again pretty funny and it does actually have a punchline to some stuff that was set up earlier in the book. So in that regard, it does work pretty well. I didn't really have an organic place to put this, but it's there now. And I have to say this thing is put together really, really clumsily. Like it's very obviously self-published and I don't think that Brad Jones consulted any sort of graphic designer or anything because it's not great. So let's say like the spacing between the lines and the spacing between paragraphs changes throughout the book. Like sometimes it's bigger, sometimes it's smaller and it goes back and forth in some ways, which is very noticeable and not a good thing to have. Like if you're going to be single space, keep it that way the whole time. Double space, keep it that way the whole time. Either of those are fine, but going back and forth is just not a good look. And when we get to like chapter titles and stuff, like the chapter titles aren't even in bold font or anything. Like if I were to, if I like had to publish a book right now and I couldn't get help from anyone else like gunned to my head, then even then I would just get into Microsoft Word and at the beginning of each chapter, I would move the chapter title to the middle of the page and I would put it at the very least in bold text, maybe make it bigger. That doesn't do it here. Like the text will just go like end of this chapter and then it'll just like two line spaces down go chapter three and the name of the chapter like in 12 point times New Roman font exactly like the rest of the book. So it just doesn't look good. Although I will say the cover is not half bad. Like I wish that the actual drawing of like the people and the van and everything was a bit bigger so that there was less empty space on it. But I do think it's a decent cover and on top of that, you could probably guess this. The actual just way that this book is written is not good. Like it's it's just not like Brad Jones is clearly not super experienced as a novelist and it shows because like his descriptions for things are odd and I don't know like just listen to a bit of the opening scene of the book. At first the future seems boring to look at even with the orange sky being interrupted by the passing green clouds as if God himself sneezed on the atmosphere. Like that's the opening of the book and the rest of the description of the scene does not get better than that and so I was thinking when I first crack this open like oh boy this is this is gonna be a rough one to get through. But it's not quite that bad throughout. I will say it gets a little bit better and I don't know if I would say that I could tell Brad was getting better while he wrote this but the writing itself I either got used to it or it did improve. So that is something worth mentioning. What I'm getting at here is that class of 86 it did need an editor, you know, because like again this is self published so it's not like Jones had to go through a whole process to get it out there. He just got it out there. I assume he did some proofreading but I did catch spelling errors in here. So like he probably should have had somebody else do that. And like I said he's not experienced as a novelist and I mean that's a skill that takes time to hone so it would have been better if he had you know gotten an editor who could help him clean it up and help shave off some of the rough edges here like I don't think this is terrible but it's not great like again I would say I would say it's okay at best but I do see potential you know like again the story and characters and all that it's not very good but it doesn't seem to be trying to make them that good it's really just focusing on the comedy so that's what I'm focusing on and some of the jokes landed some of them didn't. I think that if Brad Jones were to team up with a better more established author then he could probably write something a lot better than this but as it stands I don't think he's really skilled enough to do this. So this is like I said I see potential here and I hope he continues honing his craft and working on this a bit more because this is actually just kind of a worse version of Ghost Hunters Adventure Club and The Secret of the Grand Chateau which is a really funny book like this is also a YouTuber book it was written by Aaron Hansen aka Egoraptor who is one of the guys from Game Grumps it came out like I don't know a year and a half ago and I read it not long after came out and it was really funny but I didn't have much else to say beyond that you know so I didn't wind up making a video on it it was just like yeah this is a very funny book there's a lot of goofy shenanigans that the characters get up to and this one again there is like a story there but who gives a shit about it but it just works better you know the humor lands better and I just get the feeling that Aaron Hansen worked on this longer than Brad Jones worked on Class of 86 because you can tell that like just the way it's written is better there aren't like spelling or grammatical errors in there so it feels like it's still kind of amateurish in places but it's amateurish in a way where I don't know it's like amateurish but it's honed I guess it's the best way I can think to describe it also I really need to get a new chair for these things this beanbag is hurting my back anyways I've rambled long enough Class of 86 if you're looking for just a goofy screwball comedy maybe maybe check it out you know like there's worse ones out there but there's also better ones so you know hopefully Brad Jones will continue to improve that's about all I have to say here goodbye oh okay you're you're still you're still watching well thanks I appreciate it you know I could always use more watch time you see all these names here these are my patrons these are people that send me money once a month over on patreon if you want to get your name here and also get early access to videos and stuff then considering consider donating please my $10.00 and up patrons are Aposavalanan, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotys, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Chib Zahoy, Dan Anceliovic, Dark King, Dio, Echo, Flax, James M, Karkat Kitsune, Lexi DeLorm, Liza Rudakova, Lord Tiebreaker, microphone, Mistboy, Peep the Toad, RobiReviews, Sad Martigan, Sillier the Vixen, Stone Stairs, Tesla Shark, Vaivictus, and Wesley you're all great thanks I appreciate it that's all goodbye